Schools should close early on a Friday

Sorry but if the TAs are still expected to come in when school opens and leave when it finishes why should they then provide what would realistically be free hours? Unless they are being paid? And where is the budget coming from?

Except presumably you would like professions such as the Police, GPs, hospital & ambulance staff etc. to still be available on a Friday afternoon?

As a working parent (NHS) it is hard enough to get the wrap around care I need to do my job, which also includes long hours where I end up catching up on (frankly excessive) paperwork in my own unpaid time.

This shouldn't be a race to the bottom, none of us should be forced to be doing this, but if schools close early to give teachers more admin time why not just cut back the hours of NHS services while we're at it?

I am in complete admiration of the work teachers do, and ideally the system would be better funded in the first place so staff aren't so stretched, but staff in other professions are desperately stretched too.

I feel like I definitely had a lot of teachers at school who were absolutely winging it curriculum wise. It was literally old school. Latin teachers chatting about whatever in between random verb conjugations. English teachers discussing may pal's latest Jilly Cooper novel. Those teachers were also everyone's favourite. Somehow we learned a lot regardless so why does everything have to be so rigidly planned and graded these days. Seems to be a bit of a disaster for everyone. Kids are stressed and teachers clearly aren't coping. Seems like we've lost what learning is even about.

@Riversideandrelax I take it this is rhetorical question because no - of course they don't.

They don’t have set hours like other jobs do. There are obviously the set hours which they need to be in school for but then it’s however many extra it takes to get the job done

This is true of all professional jobs, why do you think it's unique to teaching?

Do teachers get paid for Parents evenings?

I agree with this as a parent but unless the country changes the model to a 4 day working week (with more available childcare) then it just doesn’t work.

I say this as a teacher also knowing that PPA would then be on the day children wouldn’t be at school - meaning it wouldn’t benefit my children either as they’d need childcare so I could plan etc.

I thought Wednesday afternoon was the traditional early finish day. The same at university.

Yeah agreed, that would be fab, as long as all employers offered a 4 day week for the same pay too.

I personally think primary schools should only have a 4 day week. It's far too long for them and unnecessary to be as long in my opinion. :)

At my DD's Primary the class teachers got their PPA time while the DC were with specialist teachers - French, Music and P.E/Swimming. I think it worked well.

I also struggle with the implication on these sorts of threads that parents can somehow solve the recruitment/retention issues in schools. We can’t. I am fully supportive of the teachers who teach my children, but I can’t make things better for them (I know I’m going to get the cries of ‘don’t vote Tory’ now but rest assured I don’t, and never have).

No, I don’t want that for my children. And I didn’t say ‘if they don’t like it, they can leave’, I was talking purely about my own situation and attitude to my role. I was just addressing the misconception that ‘most’ other people work set hours. We don’t.

What is PPA?

@Goolagoo

The problem with PPA is that schools ignore the fact that it should be fixed on the teacher's timetable and shouldn't be used for anything else.
Unfortunately SLT used PPA time as a bank for cover to save money, but then complain when lessons are not "outstanding".

I think in that situation I'd be concerned how much my child could take in by doing an extra 30 mins a day and if they would need extra break times to allow them to absorb the information.

I'd also be concerned about how the extra time each day would impact in extracurricular activities. 30 mons a day extra doesn't sound like much, but if they also need another 15 mins break to make it meaningful, then it makes it difficult to do a range if activities afterschool each evening. It's not practical to do 3 hours of exercise across 3 different classes and locations on one Friday afternoon. 1 hour every other day is reasonable.

Do you have any linked studies on the benefits for the children by having a longer school day 4x a week and a shorter Friday to demonstrate the benefits? That would be more reassuring bout such a proposal.

The problem with the ‘If you don’t like it, leave’ attitude towards teachers saying they’re overworked is that they ARE leaving.

@Youdontevengohere do you know how bad the recruitment and retention is in teaching? Teenagers are spending entire school years being taught maths by non specialist teachers. Do you want that for your children.

I’m retired now, so no skin in the game, but come on, we need to value and protect the people that teach us to read.

I was responding to the person who was under the impression that teachers leave work early every day. I (as a non teacher) leave work at my part time 30 hours job between 2 and 6 depending on what day it is.

This!

you already finish in the middle of the actual working day!

kids might benefit from more creative Friday afternoons/ more outdoors stuff etc for sure but there is nothing stopping teachers from doing this!

You do your overview of the year and add a bit more detail for each term.

The issue is that despite your planning, each class is different.

Sometimes the kids get a concept really quickly, so what you’d planned for the rest of the week goes in the bin and out comes the laptop. The opposite happens and you have to plan additional lessons.

Occasionally a child comes into the class for whom a unit work is inappropriate and you have to plan something else.

Sometimes, you’ve planned one thing, but discover an amazing creative or scientific streak in your class and want to take the learning towards their interests.

The class TA might be off sick for weeks and the lessons that require two people can’t work like that any more.

There’s all sorts of reasons why the details of planning happens on an ongoing basis.

Sounds like your school are missing a trick when managing PPA time and staff cover. Or maybe teachers are our DC's school are lucky. Teachers from each year group take a morning or afternoon per week for PPA and they all sit and do it together with the head of year leading (3 form per year school). Then the kids have PE, French, other subjects taught by staff who are not their class teacher, supported by TA. If any class teachers are off for any reason and there are no spare TAs or cover teacher, the kids are split into other classes for the day. From what I gather PPA is fiercely ring fenced and never dropped. Kids are used to being flexible and never moan about any of this.

Working parents could not cope with a 4.5 day week on top of all the holidays, inset days, polling days etc!

I think this is another source of confusion/misunderstanding. Most professional/salaried roles don’t have set hours either. I have ‘core’ hours of 9-5, however my contract, and every contract I’ve ever had, states that I must work ‘the required hours to fulfil my role’. Like teaching, there is no paid overtime. There is an expectation that people will go above and beyond, and if you don’t/can’t do that then you’re first in line for redundancy in the constant merry go round of ‘restructures’.
I’m not in the habit of moaning about my profession as I chose it, and I can always choose to leave. However I work in the same industry as my husband. We often go weeks without seeing each other because on the nights I’m not working until 11pm, he is. We also have a disabled child so we have to tag team around his care, and we have to use our limited annual leave for his medical appointments and therapies. It’s tough for a lot of people.

I have voted YABU. No because the extra time won't benefit the teachers. Extra time will benefit us all. I can do with two hours of quiet work on a Friday to plan next week and to finish some task. I have voted YABU because of all the changes that will have to happen in those kids parents busy schedules to accommodate those hours for the teachers.

My parents were both teachers (now retired). My father was a deputy head and his usual hours were 7.30-6.30, almost every day. Sometimes later evenings, and always at least some days in the schools holidays. It was rare for him to leave at 5pm, and I cannot remember a single time when he left school when the children did, either on Friday or any other day.

@Choochoo21

Is that 52 hrs a week average over the year or over the school year ?

If the former that's shocking , if the later that's pretty standard working over a year